Tag Archives: mobile

New features in the newspaper activity

Software

Another update on the Plasma netbook project: in this little video i’ll show the last improvements of the so called newspaper activity, little things that however have all their own place in the big picture:

  • Slightly different look, the wallpaper is more visible and there are less margins
  • Widgets have titlebars, that shows the widget name as well 3 buttons: the close button, configure and the new associated application launcher i presented the last time (it has been designed with the netbook shell in mind)
  • Some days ago, Adenilson and Igor came up with a really nice patch to animate the scrolling widgets used by Plasma: now everything that uses it, from the newspaper activity to the microblogging plasmoid automatically got a way more smooth and organic look and feel, hats off to them
  • Is now possible to create and delete newspaper activities, to have as much “pages” as one likes, selectable by the top toolbar

In this video it’s also possible to see more changes, both in the panel and in the Search and Lauch activity, but this is for the next time! (i love teasing people 🙂


OGG version

As usual, the screencasting appliation has a pretty poor refresh rate and pretty bad refresh problems, to this does not actually reflect 100% the real thing:)

Netbook shell after Tokamak 3

Software

Here we go with the long promised screencast about the progress of the Plasma Netbook shell after Tokamak. This time I’ve tried to record an audio track as well: the process is still not very well streamlined so the quality is still so so (composite+screencast still seems a big nono these days) and yeah, bear with my english, it’s what it is, like a certain Nintendo character :p

Aaanyways the stuff I talk about in this video is:

  • How to try it if you have a svn trunk build
  • Keyboard and touch screen navigation
  • New background dialog
  • Integration with the new widgets explorer

Where the last two are true for the Plasma desktop in general, thanks to the work of Davide and Ana respectively at Tokamak 3.


OGG version

Progress on the netbook ui

Software

A while since last blog, so it seems nice to give some updates on the progress on the Plasma netbook shell, since in the past weeks i did some visual changes.

Netbook newspaper

Now the widgets in the newspaper activity shows their background, to achieve more opacity (and readability), and the scroll area have a neat shadow effect to make the clipped edges to look better. The widget in the newspaper containment now should also keep their aspect ratio in a better way.

Netbook newspaper

Also the search and launch interface has some fixes in its layout, and when no query is entered in the search field it spots some icons that do default queries, like all programs of a given category, all contacts and all bookmarks.

To maximize the space given to applications in those tiny screen resolutions now the panel is auto-hide, with the same sliding animation present in the main plasma desktop autohide panels (from KDE 4.4 done by my first Kwin effect, yay :D)

Here comes the usual video (the flickering of the panel is just a problem of the screencast), in the usual YouTube or OGG-o-vision, enjoy 😀